It's been hot

Welcome, heated reader, as this week we've been having something of a heat wave here in California. As is often the case, it was forecasted to be hot, but when the day came along, it was actually quite a lot hotter. This hot, in fact:

Over here, heat like this just means staying indoors: pretty much everything is air conditioned, including our house, so you shut the doors and the windows and you hunker down with the AC on. Simple enough.

Well, it would be, if California actually had the resources to support the required level of power consumption. And of course it doesn't, so this happens:

In practice, what's actually going on here is that California has a very high proportion of solar energy these days, and that begins to tail off from about 5pm. That means that during the early evening, there isn't quite enough power to cope with folks needing lighting and still needing that all-important air conditioning, so we're told to conserve energy from 4pm to 9pm.

The good news is: we didn't have power outages in Palo Alto, although plenty of other nearby areas did. It looks like it's cooling down this week, so the chances of more power problems are reducing.

We also went to a very hot baseball game last weekend; it was unusually warm for San Francisco, where it's generally quite a bit cooler. So warm in fact that in the part of the Bay just behind the baseball stadium, there were many, many folks in canoes waiting for a left-hander to hit a home run:

They were rewarded when a ball ended up in the water during the 4th innings; unfortunately it wasn't the home team that hit it. But the Giants just about managed to run out winners, hanging on to win 5-4.

And of course, this week we lost Queen Elizabeth II, who obviously didn't think a lot of Liz Truss becoming the new PM. She's not the only one, although I'm not sure I'm capable of quite such a dramatic mic drop on that one. Of the many tributes, three of the most baffling were Canadian PM Justin Trudeau hamming it up like nothing more than a minor soap actor, Liz Truss looking like the supply teacher who has to take the assembly because the head teacher's just been sacked, and Kier Starmer resembling Bob Mortimer but quoting the Mighty Boosh. The BBC ran an item walking through each of the Queen's 15 Prime Ministers: the most striking thing on hearing the oration of someone like Harold Wilson was how much politics has lost in the intervening 50 years.

Anyway, next week we're off to Denver, to resume our cross-country rail odyssey, in preparation for what I'm reliably informed is called "leaf peeping" in Vermont. Maple syrup here we come!